Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2001 > The Early XMas Season 2001 Edition
It is the XMas season. In my home town every other house is decked out with lights of all types and colors. Some of the decorations are more garish than others. The local park is a blazing light show. The downtown streets have their decorations out, too, and XMas music drifts from the loudspeakers (softly this year!).
My folks have a big tree already draped with lights, glass balls, and ornaments made out of milkweed pods (Madre's specialty).
I have now bought all my XMas gifts. Some I have with me, ready to wrap; others are on backorder, and I have no idea whether they will arrive in time for XMas.
The DVD drive my folks gave me has a defective eject button. I had no choice but to return it to the original machine, now in Tina's hands as she practices to be a computer technician, just like me! Bwahahaha!
Anyway, I bought a new DVD-ROM drive for my Windows box, as well as another 256MB of Kingston RAM on sale at Office Max. I will install them tonight. If it works you will see an additional entry to the Caitlin Clarke Page.
And now for some opinions…
I lent my Snappy™ video capture device to my sister the teacher, who wanted to extract images of her school's Veterans' Day convocation for the school newspaper. In return I get to pet her wacky cats; see my niece get territorial; and hear how she has become the de facto assistant computer technician at the middle school where she teaches, because:
In Hoosier schools—where basketball is Lord—athletics get far greater support from the parents and school boards than academics. Never mind, that athletics doesn't do you any good in looking for a well-paying job: Most of those today assume that you have in your head something more than rental space.
If you are one of those rare people who read this page, you'll know I've already touched on this several months ago. The basketball coach at my old high school—despite widespread parental and media support—was fired by the school board in a secret meeting. I just thought I'd mention this because school board elections will be coming up, and those people merit rigorous punishment.
Anyway, where my sister teaches, they are going to build a new, bigger high school and close two older ones. Why? Chiefly, so that the high school athletes can play at the highest class of basketball competition in Indiana—right up there with Marion and Fort Wayne and Gary. Never mind, that fewer teachers will be dealing with more students, which means more students will slip through with minimal or no education.
Remember: Basketball is Lord.
Sixty years ago this past Friday two ignorant racist nations came together in the spirit of hostility and malice.
Ignorant: because each nation knew very little of the other. The USA knew nothing of Sun Tsu (as it is ignorant of history in general) and his sanction of the element of surprise; else they would have guessed Pearl Harbor might come. Japan, on its part, knew nothing of how the American people would have reacted to such a surprise attack, since all they knew of Americans were diplomats, politicians and other lower forms of moral life, which do not behave as average Americans do.
Racist: because each nation believed to be the chosen nation of God, Amaterasu, history, or whatever; and that all other nations and peoples were, well, lesser:
That, at any rate, is how the propaganda posters of each depicted the other during the Second World War.
Thus did these two nations come together sixty years ago in conflict for control of the Pacific Ocean and of the markets of China. That one side was the stronger did not, in itself, matter. The weaker can overcome the stronger if the stronger is incompetent. All the worst for the weaker if it proves incompetent itself. So it was with the military leaders of Japan. They were so grossly inept that:
Thus those leaders deserved the ropes around their necks—long ropes, to match the long noses that those purblind fools were finally found to possess.
XMas carols are playing on the radio, along with more modern XMas music. The traditional carols sound a discordant note coming from stations that normally broadcast rock (and usually crappy rock at that—some of those rock groups really ought to be put to sleep). Even if sung by modern singers, nineteenth-century Christmas hymns (like most hymns, "fifth-rate poetry set to sixth-rate music", as C.S. Lewis called them) sound as odd as a news report spoken in Shakespearean English.
And don't get me started about Deck The Halls! On the first verse we sing that sixth-rate music, dress up in drag and drape corridors with the intestines of some poor woman named Holly. Argh!
If you're going to sing or play these songs, then at least retranslate them into modern speech. They sound ridiculous.